by Joan Aiken
But Sarah had said, “She might as well have the lot, now I’ve cut it off.”
He almost put out his hand to take it back; wondered if, without her noticing, he could slip the packet back into his pocket.
Drewett brought in the sherry in the graceful decanter with a long, fine glass spout at one side. He commented on it.
“My husband bought it in Spain,” she said . “Twenty years ago. I have always taken great care of it.”
The look on her face gave him again that chilly feeling of uneasiness. “Another glass?” she asked him.
“No, I really have to go.” He looked at his watch and said with relief, “My taxi will be coming back for me in five minutes.”
There came a sudden curious mumbling sound from a dim corner of the room. It made him start so violently that he spilt some of his sherry. He had supposed the place empty, apart from themselves.
“Ah, feeling better, dear?” the old lady said.
She walked slowly over to the corner and held out a hand, saying, “Come and see poor Sarah’s husband. Just think—she had a husband—isn’t that a queer thing?”
Orford gazed aghast at the stumbling slobbering creature that came reluctantly forward, tugging away from the insistent white hand. His repulsion was the greater because in its vacant, puffy-eyed stare he could detect a shadowy resemblance to Sarah.
“She’s just like a child, of course,” said the old lady indulgently. “Quite dependent on me, but wonderfully affectionate, in her way.” She gave the cretin a fond glance. “Here, Louisa, here’s something pretty for you! Look, dear—lovely hair.”
Dumbly, Orford wondered what other helpless, infirm pieces of humanity might be found in this house, all dependent on the silver-haired old lady who brooded over them, sucking them dry like a gentle spider. What might he trip over in the darkness of the hall? Who else had escaped?
The conscious part of his mind was fixed in horror as he watched Louisa rapaciously knotting and tearing and plucking at the silver-gold mass of hair.
“I think I hear your taxi,” the old lady said. “Say goodnight, Louisa!”
Louisa said goodnight in her fashion, the door shut behind him—and he was in the car, in the train, in a cold hotel bedroom, with nothing but the letter her mother had written her to remind him that Sarah had ever existed.
Red-Hot Favourite
It was a fatal day for Robert Kellaway, magazine illustrator, confirmed misogynist, and avoider of the female sex when a picture of him appeared in the editorial column of Herself.
“All by Herself,” the column was called, and the picture of Robert was so very handsome (taken in a lucky moment without his glasses on), the paragraph about his tumbledown old house and bachelor existence in Dulwich was so very chatty, that within a week he had been visited by half the magazine’s subscribers and written to by the other half, which, considering that Herself had a circulation verging on the million mark, was too much for a man of peaceful and retiring habits. He never wanted to see a pretty face again, or hear a charming voice offering to mend his socks.
Three weeks later he had sold the Dulwich house and was in the bar-parlour of The Goat and Badger in a small village in West Sussex, asking about transport to drag a railway carriage up to the foot of the downs.
“Mr Cowlard would lend you his tractor, daresay,” said the landlord, “or Mr Beadle have a pair of carthorses.”
“Not horses, no,” Robert said, shuddering. “I can’t stand the sight of the things. My father used to paint them—Sir Edwin Kellaway, you know, R.A.—and the whole of my childhood was spent giving lumps of sugar to horses to make them stand still in the studio. I’ll go and see Mr Cowlard.”
Mr Cowlard was willing to oblige, and in the golden evening, when the shadows of the downs lay over the fields like ice-cream cones, an orange-and-blue tractor chugged up the chalky track dragging a second-hand first-class Pullman coach.
Robert had found a secluded spot for his retirement. The abandoned single-track railway from Linfold to Cowchester ran through the downs in a long cutting leading to a tunnel. He had leased half a mile of cutting, and a hundred yards of tunnel to be used as outhouse and spare bedroom. The track had been taken up, so there was no risk of a haphazard express dashing through and spoiling his living arrangements.
It was snug, sheltered, and remote, and Mr Cowlard drove off with the remark that he wished he had a tidy little place like that for when the missis got fratchety.
Food was no problem, since Robert always lived on brown ale, borsch, and breakfast cereals—this had been one of the aspects of his life deplored by Herself. He ordered a barrel of beer from The Goat and Badger and brought a gross carton of Oat Crisps with him from London. There was a sugar-beet field below the downs owned by Mr Cowlard, who was glad to exchange some of his crop in return for stories of the wicked goings-on in the magazine world. He often strolled up of an evening with a beet or two and stayed to help Robert convert his Pullman into a studio and drink a peaceful pint over the puzzles on the backs of the Oat Crisp packets. It was an idyllic existence.
Presently Robert remembered that he was nearing the deadline for his next illustration, to accompany a story called “Orchids for Love.” He felt strangely unwilling to get going. Firstly he had lost the story—but that was nothing new. He always lost the story, and editors had been known to do damage to the plots of authors from Shaw to Shakespeare sooner than ask Robert to alter his illustrations. The main reason for his reluctance to start, however, was that his glasses had fallen off in the excitement of the move and been crushed under the wheels of Mr Cowlard’s tractor, which made him view the world in misty, if beautiful, outline. He had sent the fragments in an Oat Crisp packet to Messrs. Chicory and Flax, opticians in Fleet Street, but had not yet heard from them; it was probable that they were finding the task of repair beyond their powers.
The third obstacle was the difficulty of finding a model who wouldn’t start trying to mend his socks.
Robert felt his way down into Linfold, peering about shortsightedly. He gazed with interest at a poster of a handsome black cat on a green background and wondered why it should exhort him to Keep Albert. Was Albert the cat? Surely everybody couldn’t keep Albert? A few hundred yards farther on it struck him that the poster had probably said Keep Alert.
“That’s a fine thing to ask a man,” he thought dejectedly, and turned into The Goat and Badger to order another barrel of Double Ruby.
“Are there any pretty girls in Linfold?” he asked.
The landlord, who had been so helpful over the transport question, misunderstood him and supplied three addresses in quick succession before Robert managed to explain his needs. Then Mr Cheam shook his head.
“Nary a one in the place; bony as young skeletons with all that horse-riding,” he said confidentially.
“I can’t abide a horsy woman,” Robert agreed.
“Dozens of ’em round here. It’s a horsy part of the world. Talkin’ of which, can I sell you a ticket for the Derby Sweep?”
“It’s a waste of money,” sighed Robert, pushing over his half-crown. “I never win anything.”
“What ’bout them Oat Crisp puzzles you be forever doin’?” called out Mr Cowlard from farther down the bar. “Wait till ’ee win five thousand from one o’ them.”
“But talking about women,” Mr Cheam went on thoughtfully, “I’ve got a collection of wigs upstairs; a theatrical lady left ’em behind in settlement of her bill. Would they be any use to you, Mr Kellaway? They say beautiful hair makes all the difference to a pretty face. Put one of them wigs on my Jimmy and he could sit for you as a young lady I daresay.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Robert agreed. “In fact it’s a damn good one.”
It was arranged that Jimmy should bring the wigs up that afternoon for a trial sit, and Robert walked back with satisfaction, looking approvingly at the charming wavy village, his eyes misty from myopia and Double Ruby. He read a placard on the smithy re
lating to the use of garden hoses as The Use of Career Horses is Strictly Forbidden, and reflected with vague wonderment on what these animals might be: vicious tuft-hunting beasts, no doubt, who, once getting the bit between their teeth, dashed off in headlong career down the village street—
“Damn,” he said, falling over a lump of chalk in the middle of the track. What use could career horses be put to, anyway? Maybe the villagers had laid bets on them until a stern County Council stepped in and said there must be no more of it.
The picture of Jimmy Cheam in a nylon wig, gazing pensively at a bunch of cowslips, was, of course, rather hazy, owing to Robert’s lack of glasses.
“Am I really all runny at the edges like that?” said Jimmy. “Coo.”
“That’s the way I see you,” Robert told him severely. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” All the same he squinted at the picture doubtfully as he parcelled it up. Larry will just have to make do with it, he said to himself. My glasses should have come by the time the next one’s due. Chicory and Flax had sent a postcard regretting their inability to put the splinters together and promising a new pair within six weeks.
In the meantime he embarked on an even mistier picture of Jimmy in an auburn wig with an alice-band of marguerites.
Painting was proceeding some days later when it was interrupted as by a bombshell. A large man bounced into the Pullman, rotund, beaming, carnation-buttonholed—the great Larry Selvage himself, editor of Herself, looking with a sort of incredulity first at the clutter around him, then at the white dust on the toes of his beautiful shoes.
“Dear boy! So this is where you have hidden yourself! Don’t you find it a little remote? a little rustic? a little rural? Not that it lacks personality of course—wait, and I’ll just call up Hawkins from the Cadillac with his camera—”
“No no,” cried Robert in agony. “You made Dulwich uninhabitable for me, leave me in peace here, for heaven’s sake. When I marry I want it to be from choice, not because I have given up the unequal struggle.”
“Very well, very well—” Larry waved a hand soothingly. “Just as you say, dear lad. What I really came to tell you was how breathtakingly appealing your last illustration was—that melting, misty radiance! Marvellous! From now on, nothing but that technique—and we’ve put your price up by fifty guineas.”
“Oh, how—how nice,” said Robert weakly. “We must celebrate this. Would you like a plateful of borsch?”
But Larry, giving the Pullman a dismissing glance, preferred to take his chance at The Goat and Badger.
Mr Cheam greeted Robert apologetically. “That’s a bit of bad luck your horse has been stolen, Mr Kellaway,” he said with sympathy.
“Horse?” Robert was puzzled. “I haven’t got a horse.”
“Horse you drew in the Derby Sweep,” Mr Cheam reminded him. “You had Dog-rose, the favourite, remember? And I see in the paper she’ve been took and stolen. Still, maybe they’ll find her before the race. Police on the track, it says.”
“Oh, too bad,” Robert said inattentively. “Still, she wouldn’t have won if I drew her. I never win anything.”
He was soon to be contradicted. When he had seen off Larry in the Cadillac, amid exhortations to keep on painting in his new style, he returned to the Pullman to find two men staring thoughtfully at his piled-up cartons of Oat Crisps. Their faces were a vague blur to Robert, but he could see that they wore bowlers.
“Pretty little spot you’ve got here, Mr—”
“Kellaway,” Robert said, wishing they’d go.
“Undisturbed, eh? Not many strangers?”
“That is why I came here,” Robert said pointedly. “I don’t expect to see a stranger from one week’s end to the next.”
“Great eater of Oat Crisps, I see,” remarked the smaller bowler. “Ever go in for the competitions?”
“From time to time,” Robert admitted.
“I thought so! I knew it! And your first name is—?”
“Robert.”
“Not Mr Robert Kellaway?” The little man seemed overwhelmed at his luck. “The very man we’ve come to find! We have the pleasure of telling you, sir, that you have won a prize in the Oat Crisp contest.”
“Five thousand pounds?” asked Robert hopefully.
“No, sir. Better than that—a pure-bred, fully-trained racehorse. We’ll bring it up this evening; always better to move a horse after dark, you know, not so unsettling for it.”
“But, hey, hold on—” Robert called after their retreating backs, “I don’t want a racehorse! I can’t stand the blasted things!”
No use; they had gone, and they returned after dusk with a loose box and unloaded a large horse.
“You’ll soon get fond of it,” they promised, ignoring Robert’s protests. “A horse can be a wonderful companion. You’ll wonder how you ever did without it.” And they departed briskly, even hurriedly, leaving Robert and his new companion face-to-face. Robert reflected with embarrassment and annoyance that he didn’t even know the creature’s name.
“Here, you, Galloper,” he said crossly, “you’d better sleep in the tunnel, you needn’t think I’m going to put you up in my studio.” And he shoved back the metal-mesh gates.
He did, however, feel obliged to tie a pink eiderdown round the horse’s middle, as the tunnel seemed a cheerless sort of bedroom. Then he wondered if the animal had had any supper. Oat Crisps seemed more suitable to offer than borsch, and the horse evidently thought so, too.
“That’s enough, that’s enough, damn it,” snapped Robert as Galloper demolished a week’s ration. He went to bed in an indignant frame of mind; it was going to be a fine thing if all his extra money from Herself was to be spent on the upkeep of a huge, hungry horse.
Next morning, though, looking at Galloper, who proved to be a handsome glossy brown the colour of a horse-chestnut, he couldn’t help being rather taken with his new possession. He felt shy about informing the village that he had suddenly joined the despised ranks of horse-owners and decided that, for the time at least, he would keep Galloper’s presence a secret, until he and the horse had had a chance to get used to each other. Galloper would have to go into the tunnel when callers were expected.
Later in the day, after ordering another gross of Oat Crisps at the village shop—“How you do get through them, Mr Kellaway,” Miss Grooby said—he went into The Goat and Badger to inquire cautiously if there was anybody round about who taught riding.
“Colonel Paragraph,” said Mr Cheam at once. “Bottom of the hill, big white house on the right. Can’t do better. Thinking of riding in the Derby, Mr Kellaway, ha ha?”
Robert went carefully down the hill. He could now find his shortsighted way through the bumps and crevasses of his own track, but this was strange territory. He began to wonder if he could learn to ride without being able to see more than a couple of yards. Presumably, however, the horse could see where it was going.
He was just able to distinguish the big white house, and went across a cobbled yard where a dimly-glimpsed boy in blue jeans was rubbing down a horse.
“’Morning!” yelled a voice in his ear. He turned and saw a brown-tweeded red peony with a white frill round it: Colonel Paragraph.
“’Morning, sir,” said Robert. “I want to learn to ride.”
“Couldn’t come to a better place,” affirmed the Colonel. “Left it rather late, what? Better late than never, though. Soon put you in the way of it. Phil!”
“Father?”
“Bring out Daisy and give this young feller an hour’s tuition. Same time every morning for three weeks, eh? That suit? Come in after the lesson for a Black Dewdrop and a yarn—always pleased to see a new face.”
The boy Phil was friendly and managed to instruct Robert without making him feel too much of a fool; the ride was quite a success. At the end of the hour Phil stabled the horses while Robert went in for his Black Dewdrop, which proved to be a potent mixture of stout and rum.
“M’ daughter will be in
soon,” said the Colonel, but Robert was not at all anxious to meet the Colonel’s daughter and quickly took himself off.
The routine of the lessons remained the same, and at the end of three weeks Robert had acquired a fair knowledge of how to sit a horse, had consumed twenty-one Black Dewdrops, and had still managed to avoid meeting the Colonel’s daughter.
One evening he decided that it was time to try out his new skill on Galloper, who was frisky as a foal from a steady diet of Oat Crisps and no exercise. Robert put on his saddle and bridle, carefully following Phil’s technique, climbed onto Galloper’s back from a pile of sleepers, and urged him up the side of the cutting. When they were at the top, and had a clear five miles of downland before them, he gave the horse a tap with a piece of luggage-rack.
The result was electrifying. Galloper did not jerk or bound or gather himself together: he just started. He started into a sort of jet-propelled forward motion that only occasionally brought him in contact with the ground. Bushes, trees, stones, gateposts swung past indistinguishably, and Robert sat tight and prayed. After a bit he began to enjoy it and prayed a little less; this smooth hurtle was pleasingly different from Daisy’s bouncing canter. His only worry was, when would it stop?
To his relief, after about twenty minutes Galloper began to slow down a little and Robert was able to turn him round and make for home at a more reasonable pace. All the same it had been quite an experience, and he began to acknowledge that there was something to be said for this riding caper; it was certainly a quick way of getting about the country.
“I have a horse,” he said next morning to Phil, “that goes a lot faster than this.”